The Penultimate Word

Peter Neubäcker, who developed Melodyne, the premier pitch-correction program, has new software out which can take a music recording of, say, a piano or string quartet, separate out the individual notes in all the chords, and allow you to change them at will. Want to change a major chord to a minor? No problem. This is a video of him demoing the software at Musikmesse Frankfurt. This is incredible stuff.

(Via Alex Ross)

This is a really creative video demoing Gmail, created by engineers in Google’s Moscow office. More on all the stuff that went into creating it here.

This is way cool:

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a prototype contact lens that incorporates an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. The prototype is a step toward creating a form of bionic vision, the researchers say.

The researchers say the flexible lens is biologically safe and was worn by rabbits for up to 20 minutes with no adverse effects. Along with a circuit, the prototype contains red LEDs for a display, though it does not yet light up. The display could potentially create a surface for Web surfing in midair, flash a vehicle’s speed to a driver, or immerse someone in a virtual world, the university said.

Think of the possibilities:

Stuck in a boring meeting? Surf the web - no one would know
Read the music and watch the conductor as the same time
Never take your eyes of the road when getting directions from your GPS device

As long as you don’t start talking like Ahnold…

So the bank where one of my businesses has its commercial checking account sent us the following letter:

Dear — Bank Customer:

Protecting the privacy and security of your personal and financial information is a responsibility we take very seriously at — Bank. We also know it is our responsibility to alert you to any situation that we are aware of that may be confusing or cause concern. We have learned that our recent Consumer Privacy Policy notice was misaddressed due to a simple mailing error. Regrattably, you may have received a Consumer Privacy Policy notice addressed to another — Bank customer.

The mailing error was te result of a misalignment between your name and your address in the envelope mailing file sent to printing. As a result, your name may have been paired with another customer’s address. I want to personally reassure you that the file did not contain any of your nonpublic personal information or account information.

Blah, blah, blah …

When you screw up the mailing of your privacy policy, what does this tell you?

Wikipedia has been rightly criticized for the ability of cranks, obsessives and bad actors to squeeze out good material and drive knowledgable contributors completely off the site (some examples). Now comes a professor of computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz with a fairly straightforward method of ranking the reliability of articles on the site.

Other sites already employ user ratings as a measure of reliability, but they typically depend on users’ feedback about each other. This method makes the ratings vulnerable to grudges and subjectivity. The new program takes a radically different approach, using the longevity of the content itself to learn what information is useful and which contributors are the most reliable.

“The idea is very simple,” de Alfaro said. “If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If your contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls.”

Dubious content is color-coded in deepening shades of orange.

Press release from UC Santa Cruz.

This sounds like a pretty good system.

(Thanks to my sister the librarian).

I have a PC at work and a Mac at home, and use Firefox on both, and, of course, the bookmarks on the two machines were always different. It is simply to much work to keep track of what changes you made on what machine and try to keep the other machine updated.

I recently ran across a great Firefox add-on called Foxmarks. It is a web-based service that will keep your bookmarks synchronized on all your machines. The way it works is that you establish an account on their server, and install the Foxmarks add-on on all your machines. If you update your bookmarks on any of your machines, the changes are uploaded to your account on their server. When you later connect to the ‘net with another of your machines, Foxmarks will automatically download the changes to the other machine. It keeps your bookmarks the same on all your machines with no attention from you at alll. It is really slick.